Our Cars Phil finds another reason to dismantle his Jaguar E-type‘s rear suspension (p123), Ross discovers horrors beneath the skin of his Lancia Fulvia Zagato (p124), and Russ goes (Alfa) Spider fishing (p126)
Where did the summer go? That’s what the E-type seemed to be asking as it glared back at me from the gloom of its garage while we both waited for the fluorescent tubes above to struggle into life. As the third and final light joined in I cast an eye over the garage dust that had landed on the paintwork in the weeks since its last outing. That was before the MOT test had expired, and the summer season of events plus a holiday swept most of my weekends away.
Yes, I could have declared it MOT exempt, but I value having an independent pair of eyes cast over the car once a year and the set of braking performance figures that I now get on a printout. I’m perplexed by those who advocate the creation of a new classic-specific safety check when the MOT does exactly that, only testing cars to the standards to which they were originally built. Of course, I’ve heard of test stations wrongly applying modern standards to old cars, but with the test manual available online it’s easy to go in forearmed.
One thing my local tester did spot was play revealed when he rocked the nearside rear wheel, possibly coming from the wheelbearing. It wasn’t enough for an advisory, never mind a fail, but I decided to investigate anyway. I’ve had the rear suspension apart so many times over the past nine years that I have removing parts of the assembly, or indeed all of it, down to a routine, albeit an unwelcome one.
To check the wheelbearing endfloat the hub and carrier had to come off, complete with the halfshaft. That meant removing the nuts securing the halfshaft to the differential, drifting out the hub lower pivot, disconnecting one coil-over-damper unit and removing the other.
With the hub carrier sat on a workbench so that the halfshaft could dangle beneath, I gave the hub a light tap with a copper mallet to settle it, attached my dial gauge and levered the hub upwards to explore the endfloat. The Jaguar workshop manual says 0.002-0.006in and I read 0.003in. Perfect – which it should be because it’s not that long since I last replaced the wheelbearings and shimmed them – and impossible to improve upon without removing all of the endfloat, given that the shims come in 0.003in increments.
So, I photographed the gauge reading as evidence and put it all back together, a straightforward job until I tried to fit the long bolt connecting the lower mounts of each damper unit to the lower suspension wishbone. The only way I could get everything lined up was to compress each coil-over-damper unit a little.
A waste of time? With a fresh MOT and the reassurance that the wheelbearings were OK, it didn’t feel like it as I set off for a celebratory drive on that warm, sunny Saturday morning.